


ricochet

by naheka



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Step-Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-07 22:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11632926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naheka/pseuds/naheka
Summary: Chris spends the last few weeks of the school year at the Clarks, then the first few weeks of summer. (Chris/Alicia).





	ricochet

**Author's Note:**

> not betaed

Chris looks at his black eye in the mirror. 

“Uh-oh,” Alicia says, making him start violently and wish he’d closed the door. “Difference of opinions in the cafeteria?”

He glares at her in the mirror, one eye starting to swell up. “The parking lot.”

Alicia clicks her tongue. “Still on campus. Want me to narc?”

He walks towards her, almost toe to toe before she yields ground. As soon as she’s clear he wraps a hand around the edge of the door. “No,” he says, and shuts the door in her face.

++

Chris turns his alarm off and lies in his bed staring at the ceiling. He listens to the sounds of Alicia moving around in her room, the pipes squeaking on in the bathroom, the clatter as she goes through the kitchen. He waits for the thump of the front door as she leaves but instead she raps at his door. “Chris?”

“I’m sick,” he says, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard through the door. “I’m not going.”

The doorknob rattles. “Let me in.”

“Go away.”

It rattles more insistently. “Let me in or I’ll call Travis.”

He leans over to grab a sneaker off the floor and fling it at the wall next to her. “Go away, Alicia!”

Her footsteps recede. The front door slams. Chris rolls over and drags his pillow up over his head.

++

Chris waits for his father to bang at the door. Or for Madison to call him to dinner. For Alicia to rattle at his doorknob and curse him out. Instead he listens to everyone come home and the stove pop the way it does and the clink of silverware on porcelain, the muted rumble of the television.

++

His alarm doesn’t go off the next morning because he doesn’t bother to set it. He waits for everyone to leave before he rambles through the house, going to the bathroom and picking through the leftovers in the fridge. 

He’s watching daytime television when Alicia comes home, abruptly in the middle of the day. He’s frozen half standing on the couch, torn between staying and fleeing, and she rolls her eyes when she sees him. She steals the bag of cheese chips from his hands and tells him to go to take a fucking shower.

++

He’s tousling his hair dry when she barges in on him. “Jesus,” he yelps, trying to cover himself and not tip over backwards into the tub. “What the fuck?”

She pauses in the doorway, dragging her eyes up and down him. “Hm.”

He throws a loofa at her. “Get out!”

++

She’s on his bed when he’s recovered enough to get dressed and shuffle back to his room, and he sighs heavily before going to lay down next to her. She rolls on her side to face him. “Nobody likes an Eeyore, Christopher.”

“Nobody likes someone who doesn’t know how to knock.”

“Nobody likes someone who doesn’t know how to knock,” Alicia repeats, high pitched and whiny. 

Chris sighs and closes his eyes. He thinks if he ignores her long enough, she’ll get bored of him again and wander off. He can hear her breathing, the drag of her jeans on his sheets. And then the rustle of movement and a feather light touch on his bruised face. His breath catches. “Poor kid,” she murmurs, and when he opens his eyes she’s very close.

“I’m not a kid.”

She kisses his eyebrow and the air is frozen in his lungs. She smells like the sun and he’s weak against her warmth. She kisses his swollen shut eyelid, and then the underside of his jaw while he trembles. “Sleep light tonight,” she says, then rolls off his mattress and disappears out the door.

++

Chris waits up all night. Plays games on his phone and stays fully dressed with his sneakers on, legs folded up and sitting against the wall on his bed. 

Nothing happens.

++

He’s waiting for her in the kitchen. “Hey,” she greets through a yawn, wrenching the fridge open and digging through for sandwich fixings. “Going to school today?”

“Yeah,” he snaps.

She grins at him, then tucks a rolled up piece of turkey into his mouth. “Good boy.”

He chases her into the dining room, snatching the toast from her hand. “Hey!”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Problem?”

“You... you said--” Chris falters. He swallows, mouth opening and closing. Outside, a horn honks. 

“See you at lunch,” Alicia says, and leaves him there, toast in hand and crumbs on his pants.

++

Chris sits in English and feels a calm settle over him. His feet stop tapping and his brain stops whirring. He packs up all his things carefully, closing every pocket. When the bell rings he watches his feet take him to his locker, watches his fingers open it up and store his bag inside. He blinks once and he’s sitting under a tree holding an apple from the cafeteria. His teeth are imprinted in the flesh of the fruit and he can taste the bite of the peel on his tongue. He leaves the apple in the dirt and walks into the quad. 

Alicia is sitting on a bench with two other girls, legs crossed and sunglasses prominent. Three feet from her, Derek from his math class is watching. Chris walks over, waits until Derek looks at him, and hits him square in his leering smirk.

++

“Chris,” Alicia is saying. Her hands are on either side of his face and the world is swimming but she’s in high definition, clear and solid and her voice pulling him back into himself. “Chris. Can you hear me?”

He’s lying on his back. A cloud floats across the blue sky behind Alicia’s concerned face; he can feel the cement against his spine. Hands grab him and drag him up--the school’s security officer starts dragging him towards the front office. 

Alicia follows, her grip clenched in the sleeve of his hoodie. “Be careful! He’s hurt, you shouldn’t move him--” the officer pushes her away, gently but firmly, she trips in her own haste and yelps. Chris surges, snarling, her frightened wide eyes as he’s hauled away.

++

Alicia is waiting for him when he’s released into the care of his parents. She leaps up from the bench and hurries towards them, Travis and his stone cold fury and Chris feeling a little bit like he’s underwater. “Chris!” She ducks Travis’s arm and wraps him in a hug. “You’re okay,” she promises.

++

Pebbles rattle against his bedroom window in the middle of the night. Alicia is standing outside it, peering in. He wrenches it open. “We live together,” he reminds her.

She shrugs. “How bad was it?”

“No charges. Suspended for two weeks.”

She snorts. “You weren’t going anyway.”

Chris shrugs again.

She taps her fingers against the screen. “Come here, I wanna show you something.”

“Civilized people use doors,” he informs her, and starts to shut the window again. 

She taps her nails more insistently. “Yeah, they do. So pop the screen and get out here.”

Chris gets dressed. Double knots his sneakers and grabs an extra hoodie from his closet. Pops the screen out and leaves it on the dewy grass and they sneak off into the night together.

++

“Here,” he says, when she shivers.

She tugs his hoodie over her head. “Thanks.”

“Where are we going?”

She bumps her shoulder against his. “Do you care?”

It’s very quiet, suburbia in the witching hour. The faintest hum of the bugs and the sound of the wind through the perfectly manicured trees. Every so often a motion activated porch light comes on, casting odd yellow shadows on the empty roads, or he hears a car door shut somewhere in the distance. Their feet scuff side by side on the sidewalk and her arm slips into his. He remembers the way her lips felt on his, his cheek beneath her palm.

“No,” he says, and they keep going.

++

They end up in a park. “We might see Nick,” Alicia muses, craning her neck around to peer into the playground. It’s utterly deserted and she shrugs. “Or not.”

She tugs at his sleeve. “Swing with me?”

He pushes her first, because it makes her smile all pleased and toss her hair back like a princess. She kicks her legs and demands more, then spins in place, twisting the chain, while Chris sways with his toes still in the tanbark. “I don’t remember it,” he says, abrupt. His head is tipped back to look at the sky. “I don’t---I don’t remember deciding to…”

He hears the plastic creak, the wrench of the metal against itself. Her toes nudge his ankle. “It’ll be okay,” she tells him. 

They crawl into the plastic tube of the playground, scrunched up and smelling of dirt and maybe a little bit of mold, and she pulls him into her lap and nuzzles at his jaw, his hair. “I’m sorry,” he says into her neck. “I didn’t mean it.”

++

School ends in a week and Chris is supposed to go back to his mother’s for the duration. He’s been sleeping in Alicia’s bed every night, her warmth anchoring and soft at his back. She sits on his bed for a change while he packs. 

She picks at the bedspread. “Are you sure?”

Chris doublechecks the closet. “I like my mom,” he reminds her. 

“She loves you too,” Alicia mutters, something dark twisting underneath.

He crawls on the bed next to her and props his head on her knee. “Hey.”

She glares at the wall, refusing to meet his eyes. Shoves her leg out straight so his head falls to the mattress. “Don’t hey me.”

“It’s just a weekend.” He sighs. “Alicia…”

Her gaze goes oddly flat for a second, then she smiles with her tongue peeking out between her teeth. She straddles him, sudden, her weight rocking against him, her zip hoodie shucked and tossed aside. He yelps, hands out to the side and hovering. “Christopher,” she murmurs. Drapes herself across him, curves and softness and warm against his chest. 

He blushes so bright he can feel it. “Alicia!”

Her lips press under his jaw. “Chris,” she hums. Her fingers tangle with his and draw his hand up her shirt. She’s not wearing a bra, Chris thinks, and then he feels the bump of her nipple and the weight of her. He’s hard immediately and she can feel it, rocking gently and breathing soft in his ear. “Stay,” she breathes. She guides his other hand to the dip of her waistband, sliding under her shorts, his fingertips on the edge of her panties. “Stay with me.”

Chris can hear his heartbeat in his ears. “I’ll be back,” he promises. “It’s just a week.”

Alicia’s warmth disappears. She glares at him, her back against the wall. “Just get out,” she spits, and storms away. He hears her door slam.

++

Chris returns with his duffel bag and the room he usually sleeps in smells like wet cardboard.

“Sorry,” Madison says, smiling at Travis, his arm around her shoulder. “A little bit of a roof leak. But Nick is staying at a friend’s for the week, and I changed the sheets.”

“He’ll be fine,” Travis says, cheerful. “What’s a thing between brothers?” 

Alicia is leaning her shoulder against the hallway wall. “I would change the sheets again,” she says, pitched low just for his ears and bored sounding.

Travis whispers something into Maddie’s ear and they both giggle, practically scampering down the hall into the master bedroom. Chris watches them go.

“Lasagna in the oven,” Alicia informs him. “Don’t burn it in the microwave.” Her door clicks shut behind her. 

Chris looks at his duffel bag, resting on the floor by his sneakered feet. “Okay,” he says to no one.

++

Nick’s room smells like cologne and cheap deodorant. Chris drops his bag on the floor and lies on his back on Nick’s bed. 

He wakes up in the middle of the night and can hear the springs creaking in the room next to him. It drives him out to the kitchen and he watches the microwave plate rotate in the black room, the tiny light just enough to mesmerize as he waits for the blinking numbers to count down to zero.

He turns around with the plate balanced in his fingers and starts violently, the fork clattering to the floor and hot tomato sauce burning through his shirt. He yelps, his heart racing. 

“They’re loud,” Alicia says, barefoot and mussed hair and stifling a yawn against the inside of her wrist. She swoops the plate out of his hands. “Your shirt is dirty.”

Chris rips a paper towel off the roll and wipes at himself, glowering. “You scared me.”

Alicia settles in a kitchen nook chair, long bare legs folded up underneath her, tiny shorts disappearing under the hem of a men’s cut t-shirt that’s much too big for her. “Mm,” she acknowledges, and licks sauce off her thumb. 

Chris hovers uncertainly between the fridge and the table. “That was mine.”

“Mm,” Alicia agrees. She smirks at him.

Chris lets the moment drag, thinking. He goes into the freezer and finds ice cream behind the flash frozen bag of mixed vegetables and chicken thighs. Gets a spoon out of the drawer and offers it to her. 

Alicia narrows her eyes. Then her smirk eases into something softer, something that matches her pajamas and her scrubbed clean face and the little bit of sleep gunk in the corner of her lips. She accepts his trade and he settles across from her and eats his lasagna while she licks vanilla bean ice cream from a teaspoon and watches him, curious. 

She finished before he does, seemingly deciding she’s bored. She stands up, abrupt, and then leaves. At first Chris thinks she’s gone to the bathroom, but the minutes go by and she doesn’t return, the container melting onto the table. He leaves the dishes in the sink and falls asleep on the sofa. 

++

They wave goodbye from the front door. Maddie tells them to have fun at their summer program while Travis stores the suitcases in the trunk of the car. Travis pulls him aside and tells him to man up and look after his sister. 

“Not my sister,” Chris mutters, then lowers his gaze when his father stares him down. 

They wave goodbye. 

“There’s no summer program,” Alicia says, watching the car grow small and smaller before it turns a corner and disappears. 

Chris blinks. “What are we supposed to do?”

Alicia shrugs. “Whatever the fuck you want. Nick will probably come back at some point for money and food. Maybe laundry, if it’s a good week.”

“Oh,” Chris says, for lack of anything else to say. 

“Yup.” Alicia flashes a smile at him. She hikes a bag over her shoulder and walks down the front steps towards the bus stop on the corner. “Don’t do anything Nick would do.”

++

Chris lies on his back on Nick’s bed and stares at the ceiling. He plays a game on his phone. Finds a bag of chips in the bedside table and chomps his way through them and leaves the crumbs on the sheets. Takes a nap. Turns on the television and lets his brain zone out.

 

Alicia comes home at two in the morning. He listens to her spend four minutes getting her key in the lock and giggling to herself before she spills into the house, tripping over the edge of the rug and laid out on the hardwood floor, dissolved into peals of laughter. 

Chris goes over and locks the front door. He offers her his hand up and she scoffs, smacking it aside. “What’d you even do all day?” she asks, only the littlest bit slurred. 

“Television.”

“Lame.” Alicia crawls over to the edge of the couch, slow and wavering and Chris follows. She pulls herself up and stretches out. A sit com blares on the screen. “Lame,” she decrees again.

“That’s my spot.”

Alicia sticks her tongue out. 

Chris lifts her legs, causing her to yelp in surprise, and sits before settling her legs into his lap. She grumbles for a moment, then sighs, head lolling against the cushions. “Did Nick come by?”

“No.” Her face almost crumples, then forcibly smoothes out. She snorts. 

“Typical.”

She’s asleep within the hour and Chris thinks he should carry her to bed or at least get a blanket and leave her to rest but instead he slouches down, her warm weight in his lap and the soft rasp of her breathing. He resigns himself to a neckache in the morning and closes his eyes. 

++

“I’m bored,” Alicia announces at dinnertime. “What are you doing?”

“Mac and cheese.”

She comes up, bumping against his shoulder, and peers into the pot. “Enough for two?”

“If you think you can keep it down.”

She pulls a face at him. “Hangover has passed, thanks.”

Chris shrugs. “There’s enough.”

She kisses his cheek. “Thanks, baby brother.” She wanders off to the couch before he can figure out how to respond, heat rising in his face and his rabbit quick heart.

++

Chris wakes up when the window creaks. He shoots upright and slaps the bedside light on and Nick yells, one leg slung over the sill. “Jesus Christ!”

“What are you doing,” Chris demands, glowering.

“What are you doing,” Nick snaps, “it’s my fucking room.”

“There’s a front fucking door,” Chris retorts. 

“Whatever.” Nick climbs in and snaps the window shut. “The other room?”

“Roof,” Chris responds, short and still annoyed at being woken so suddenly and with a scare. 

“Sucks,” Nick says, not sounding even a little genuine.

Chris folds his arms. “I’m not moving.”

“I don’t care,” Nick says, cheerful, and leaves the room.

Chris blinks. He stops just short of pressing her ear against the wall, straining to hear:

The creak of Alicia’s door, the click of it shutting, and then the barest rumble of low low murmur of voices. 

He waits for a long time but never hears anything else.

++

Nick is gone by the time Chris hauls himself out of bed. Alicia is eating ice cream viciously and glowering at the television. He sits next to her and they stare blankly at soap operas. She goes on, determined and methodical, until it’s all gone, then stares into the empty carton.

“I’m going to throw up,” she says eventually.

Chris can’t think of a single thing to say. She leaves and he hears her in the bathroom, retching.

++

He wakes up because Alicia is crawling across him in the middle of the night to dig under the mattress. “It’s genetic,” he muses, after he realizes he’s not being attacked. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but probably.” Alicia makes a noise of triumph. She stands and then looks at him, head tilted. “You wanna get high?”

Chris blinks, his eyes adjusting slow to the dark. “Yeah,” he says, “okay.”

++

They smoke on the back porch steps. Alicia mutters about how dirty the pipe is and takes the first hit. 

Chris coughs after the first draw, his lungs loudly and emphatically protesting. She laughs at him and he takes another long drag just to prove he can.

The high is soft and sweet and sings sweet inside him. He feels loose limbed and slumped and when he breathes his body tingles. He grins at her and lets smoke tip out between his lips. The porchlight is bright in his peripheral until his eyes flutter shut when she kisses him.

++

She’s in his lap. He doesn’t know when it happened but she’s pinching his nose shut and her eyes are crossed and she misses the first time she tries it, landing a sloppy kiss to the corner of his chin, the smoke escaping.

“Hold on,” she says, when he snorts in laughter.

She gets it right the second time, and he opens his mouth to her automatically. Inhales when she exhales and some of it does go up his nose, burning and too hot. She licks at his teeth before pulling away.

“Nick’s gonna be pissed,” she muses.

He cracks her beer open for her. “Do you care?”

She looks at him. A streetlight falls half over her face and her toes wiggle in her socks. She’s wearing a sweatshirt Chris saw in Nick’s closet three days ago. “No,” she says, and clinks their beers together.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @ smolgaysnake


End file.
